Three
“YOU DIDN’T,” MY cousin Beanie said on FaceTime when I told her about it.
I winced. “I did.”
Beanie—a personal shopper—had moved from Texas to New York the week before the Lili Ventura scandal broke a year ago.
And, ever since, we’d FaceTimed every day.
The kind of video calls where you chat driving to work with your phone in the cupholder, and then home again with your phone on the passenger seat. Then, at home, you set it in the basket while you do laundry, and balance it on a bunch of bananas in the fruit bowl while you make dinner, and prop it on the sink ledge while you take a shower. The kind of video calls you do with genuine loved ones, where no one’s even trying to look good—and you’re mostly seeing the ceiling fan, or the inside of a pocket, or part of a nostril.
Right now, I was packing for Key West, and Beanie—just back from a super-busy work trip to Paris—was getting all the updates. I had her wedged into the pocket of my suitcase while I packed, and she had me resting on her dresser while she unpacked.
“Did he think you were crazy?” she wanted to know, re: my weeping at the word bikini .
“I told him it was allergies,” I said.
“Did he buy that?”
“I don’t think he cared much, either way.”
“Maybe it really was allergies.”
“And what would I be allergic to?”
“Um, to bathing suits . Obviously!”
True enough. I hadn’t owned a bathing suit since middle school.
I felt a familiar squeeze of dread. “Also, I can’t swim.”
“That’s not news.”
Of course it wasn’t. Beanie knew more about me than I knew about myself. We’d grown up together on the same block. Our dads were brothers, and after my mom left us and moved away—when I was eleven—I pretty much spent the rest of my childhood trying to live with Beanie and convince her mom to be my mom, too.
Beanie was basically my cousin, sister, and lifetime bestie all rolled into one.
We had “gone swimming” my whole life, of course. It’s too hot in Texas in the summers not to be constantly hitting the neighborhood pool, and the beach, and the lawn sprinklers whenever possible. But “getting wet and splashing around” is not the same thing as swimming.
The summer after my mom left, when all the cousins were supposed to take proper swim lessons, I’d refused to go—in part because the boy cousins kept teasing me about how often I burst into tears.
By the next summer, my dad had started dating a lady named Angela, who—I want to emphasize— had some nice qualities , but who also wanted to guide me through puberty by telling me over and over to suck in my stomach.
Beanie knew all about that, too. And she was not Team Angela.
I do think Angela meant well, in her way.
I’m not excusing her. But intentions don’t not matter. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to help. It’s just that her version of helping, as Beanie always put it, was “supremely fucked up.”
She thought the most important thing a woman could possibly be was tiny .
Within six months of marrying my dad, Angela had put me on a diet. I was twelve. Looking back at photos from those years, I’m always shocked at how much I looked exactly like all the other ordinary kids.
But I guess Angela wanted me to be extraordinary.
She was trying to teach me the rules of being a successful woman as she understood them. And it never occurred to her that women might be able to write those rules for themselves.
Don’t worry—I did my best to resist. I snuck Cheetos into a secret stash under my bed. I met Beanie at the Stop-N-Go on our bikes for Fudgsicles. I processed it all with stacks of self-help journals.
But the fact remains: I abandoned swimsuits forever after that lady showed up in my life.
So I couldn’t lay all of my insecurities at Lucas Banks’s feet. Some of them were courtesy of Angela. Some of them came from just being a girl in a world that is appallingly mean to girls. Do any of us escape unscathed?
I really was fine now. Most of the time. As long as I could keep my clothes on.
Beanie had made it her personal mission to get me back into the water. “You never used to care about that stuff!” she’d say. “We splashed at the beach all the time!”
“That was before I knew about sucking in.”
Beanie thought the swimming component of my new assignment was, and I quote: “A glorious opportunity to work through your stepmother-based trauma.”
“ Glorious feels a bit strong,” I said.
“You can confront your body-image demons and learn a new skill at the same time,” Beanie said, way too chipper about the idea. “You didn’t tell your boss you couldn’t swim, right?”
“He’s not my boss. He’s just my work superior.”
“But did you tell him?”
“I didn’t. I lied to get the job.”
“You omitted the truth , which is not the same thing.”
“Either way, I’m about to spend many upcoming weeks ‘on or near’ the water.”
“Which part of this is bothering you?”
“All of it. They’re going to make me do safety training. In the water!”
“That sounds reasonable,” Beanie said.
“But don’t you think they’ll make me wear a swimsuit?”
“Of course not,” Beanie said. But then, like we both needed more convincing, she added, “They’ll probably put you in a flight suit. Or something.”
“And then there’s the drowning problem.”
Beanie shook her head at me. “You’ll be with rescue swimmers ,” she said. “You couldn’t drown if you tried.”
“Watch me.”
Beanie leaned in to the phone to give me a look.
“I’ll be flying in a helicopter with them,” I said then, the truth of how very unqualified I was blooming in my mind. “Out over the ocean. For weeks .” Then, realizing there was no way around it, I sighed. “I should call Cole back and confess.”
Beanie was aghast. “Absolutely not. You just said these rescue swimmers work out ninety minutes a day for their job . If anyone on this earth needs a full month of cavorting with military men who are—and just based on the math, I think we can all agree— scientifically sexy, it’s you.”
I shook my head, like Nope . “Not cavorting ,” I said. “Just working.”
“If you say so,” Beanie said.
I added: “Besides. The swimmer I’m profiling hates love.”
Beanie paused. “ Hates love?”
I nodded. “He’s a love hater.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s all rules and no heart! He’s all action and no reaction! He’s all body and no soul.”
Beanie peered at me through the phone. “Who cares?”
“He’s not even human! He hasn’t dated anyone in a year.”
“ You haven’t dated anyone in a year.”
“I’m in recovery!”
“Sounds like he needs some company ,” Beanie said, as if company meant ten different things at once.
“Not from me, he doesn’t!”
But now she was nodding like she’d had an idea. “You should sleep with the love hater.”
“Oh, my god!”
But Beanie doubled down. “Yes. This is the cure for everything.”
“He hates love !”
“You could stand to hate love a little yourself.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying maybe an all-body, no-soul fling with a hero robot might help you toughen up a little.”
“I don’t need to toughen up.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I’m not sleeping with my subject, Beanie. This is my job .”
“The point is, you need an adventure. Don’t self-sabotage!”
“The point is,” I countered, “this is not an adventure. This is an attempt to not get downsized.”
“Why can’t it be both?”
But now I was shaking my head. “What was I thinking? Why did I lie about the swimming?”
“You’d rather just hand this job over to that brown-noser Mila?”
“At least she can swim.”
“Swimming’s not that hard,” Beanie said. “Just take some lessons.”
“Lessons?” I said, like I’d never heard of them before.
“You’ve got the weekend in Key West to settle in before work starts,” Beanie said. “Do a full-immersion class.” Then she tilted her head like she hadn’t meant to make that joke—but she’d allow it.
“Very funny.”
“You don’t have to win a gold medal at the Olympics,” Beanie said. “You just need to master the dog paddle.”
It was, actually, kind of a good point.
Beanie, in fact, had lots of points that were good.
It was the most annoying—and secretly helpful—thing about her. She was the queen of self-help books. Pick any bookstore, I swear, and go to the self-help section—and Beanie had read them all. Read them, highlighted them, copied quotes onto little three-by-five cards. She had memorized Brené Brown’s entire body of work. She could recite Maya Angelou’s words of wisdom like they were Shakespeare’s. And after Lucas got famous, she’d forced me to read her favorite book by love gurus John and Julie Gottman—whose work overflowed with relationship advice gold.
None of which I could remember right now.
Except for this: strong relationships had to create a culture of appreciation .
A whole book, and that was all I’d retained: People in good relationships had to appreciate each other—say thank you, give compliments, notice what their partner was getting right—in ways that created a cushion of warmth and kindness that eased everything else.
Brilliant! Right? Super helpful! Or, at least, it would have been if Lucas had read the book. Or even not been checking his TikTok DMs while I was telling him about it.
I guess, even then, we were past the point where self-help could be helpful.
But the truth was, as much as I made fun of Beanie… she got more than a few things right.
“I haven’t even told you the worst part,” I said then, not sure I wanted to say it out loud.
Beanie picked up the phone to make eye contact. “What’s the worst part?”
“When Cole was running down the equipment list,” I said, “he said he was shipping the lightest camera to Key West for me.”
Beanie frowned. “The lightest camera?”
I nodded. “Because every single thing that goes onto a helicopter has to be weighed.”
Beanie tilted her head. “Why?”
“Because if helicopters try to carry too much weight, they will sink out of the sky.”
“So they have to—what? Tally up the weight of everything on board?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Equipment. Fuel. Rescue victims.”
But Beanie wasn’t getting it. “Why is this the worst part?”
“Because,” I said slowly, knowing it would be real after I said it out loud, “ I am one of the things that will be on board.”
Beanie’s eyes got wide as the statement hit. “You have to weigh yourself?”
I nodded and closed my eyes. “And then I have to announce the number to the pilot. In front of the whole crew. So he can add it to the total.”
“That can’t be right!” Beanie protested on my behalf. “We’re not living in a nightmare!”
“I am, apparently,” I said.
“There has to be a way around it.”
“I’m telling you,” I said, “I googled it. This is how it’s done. They have a preflight check before every mission, and any unspecified weight has to be… specified.”
Beanie winced. Then she said, “Okay.” Then, apparently unable to come up with anything else, she said the thing she always said when a problem was unsolvable. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I closed my eyes. “I think it might actually kill me.”
Beanie sighed in solidarity. “That might actually be for the best.”
BEANIE HAD BEEN the person to convince me to stop weighing myself in the first place.
After the breakup, she’d taken some personal days to come back for a visit, back when I still couldn’t get out of bed. I had lain on the sofa, wrapped in the trompe l’oeil tortilla blanket she’d given me for my birthday, and I’d watched her clean my entire apartment—takeout container by takeout container.
“This is very soothing,” I said, as she walked past me with another full Hefty bag.
“It’s not just soothing,” Beanie said. “It’s cleansing . It’s a rebirth. By the time I head back to New York, you’re going to be a whole new person.”
That weekend, she took my digital scale—aka my closest friend—and wrapped it up in one of Lucas’s forgotten T-shirts, doused it all with lighter fluid, and set the whole thing on fire out by the street.
“This thing is ruining your life,” Beanie said, as we watched the flames. “Free yourself.”
She’d also scrubbed my apartment top to bottom—bathroom to kitchen and back. She vacuumed and dusted and decluttered so hard, she took six grocery sacks to Goodwill. Then she turned her attention on me—made me take a shower, get a haircut, go for a pedicure, and floss.
But even after the glow-ups, Beanie wasn’t satisfied. She stood in my living room and looked around.
“It’s awfully beige in here,” she said.
“It’s not beige, it’s ‘Oyster.’”
“It’s just so blah .”
“It’s not blah . It’s sophisticated.”
“You need some pops of color.”
But I shook my head. “I hate pops of color.”
“Too bad.”
Beanie dragged me out shopping, and before I knew it, I had four new orange throw pillows. After she was gone, I thought about donating them to Goodwill, too. But, out of guilt, I just stacked them in a closet instead.
Beanie had promised me, in the wake of my failed engagement, that I was due for a renaissance. “You’re going to come back to life in ways you never could’ve imagined,” she swore.
I wasn’t sure orange throw pillows were the key to that renaissance.
But I wasn’t sure they weren’t , either.
Sometimes Beanie was right.
The promised revival had proved elusive in the months since she’d burned my scale. But Beanie never lost sight of it. And so now, on the phone, she was evaluating this Key West job with a different set of goals than mine. I was asking questions like, Can I take this job and still physically survive?
Beanie, in contrast, was asking if this journey would help me thrive .
And that’s how our conversation seesawed, like they always did, between Beanie both pushing me to go and telling me not to. This was how we processed things—thoroughly. By switching sides until we’d covered all the angles.
“What I still don’t understand is”—Beanie was now saying on our FaceTime, switching from You deserve this! to Is this really a good idea? —“why this coworker of yours isn’t going himself.”
“He and his brother don’t get along.”
“He won’t even be there, but he arranged for your lodging?”
“The company did. It’s his aunt’s place. She’s a real estate tycoon.”
“You don’t say.”
Now I was the one who was pro me going. “I’m telling you,” I said, “I stalked the place on Vrbo. It’s a block of old-timey motor court cottages she fixed up. So charming! It’s all on the website. They could be in a magazine. And, according to Cole, she’s going to let me stay there for a deep discount. The only catch is that I can’t tell her why I’m there. At first.”
“You have to lie about why you’re there?”
“I have to be strategic with my timing.”
“And who cares about the discount? Isn’t the company paying for it?”
“Yes, but this stretches the budget. If it costs less for me to go, I can be there longer. Which means I can—hopefully—do a ‘Day in the Life’ with the love hater.”
Beanie nodded. “But you said he didn’t do interviews.”
“Cole says he can talk him into it.”
“How, exactly?”
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Um, it kind of does. And it’s weird that he doesn’t want you to tell his aunt why you’re there.”
“At first ,” I said, like that was normal. “Just until the job starts.”
“I’m just not sure about this coworker.”
“He doesn’t want me to lie ,” I said. “He just wants me to…”
“Omit the truth?” Beanie offered.
I gave Beanie a look. “To refrain from sharing the full story. For a day or two.”
“It’s sketchy.”
“It’s temporary.” Then I added, “ minutes ago, you were sending me to bed with the love hater!”
“Fine,” Beanie said. “I support you.” Then Beanie accidentally dropped her phone into her pile of laundry. After she fished it back out, she said, “You’re doing better than Lucas, anyway.”
I brought my own phone close to peer in at her. She normally refused to say his name. “What?” I asked. “Am I?”
“He got interviewed on The Tonight Show —didn’t you see?”
“I don’t follow him anymore.”
“Of course not. Good for you. And don’t watch the interview. It’s depressing as hell.”
“Does he talk about Lili Ventura?”
“No. About you. About how stupid he was to leave you.”
Ah. “Well,” I said, taking a breath, “he was stupid.”
“Preaching to the choir, lady.”
“Should I feel sorry for him now?”
“No! And don’t google him, either! Here’s what you need to know: He misses you, he never should’ve cheated, you were the only real thing in his life, and he hates himself.”
“He hated himself before. That’s, like, his whole thing.”
“He should have read that Gottman book,” Beanie said, like we’d tried to hand him all of life’s answers on a silver platter. “He should have applied the culture of appreciation to himself!” Beanie was just making chitchat—just casually judging a person who’d hurt me in a pleasant, gossipy way.
But when she said it, I gasped.
“What?” Beanie asked.
“Beanie!” I said. “That’s genius!”
She frowned. “Which part?”
“The culture-of-appreciation thing,” I said. “Turning the Gottmans on yourself.”
Beanie paused to think about it.
“They’re talking about relationships,” I said, “but you don’t just have relationships with other people. You have one with yourself, too.”
Beanie waited.
“I definitely have a relationship with myself. It’s judgmental and toxic, but it’s there.”
Beanie squinted to indicate she did not condone the toxicity.
“I mean, an abusive relationship with yourself is still a relationship, right?”
Beanie frowned. “I guess? Technically?”
“If I created a culture of appreciation with myself , maybe I could make the relationship better. And maybe it could create that cushion of warmth and kindness they talk about. And then maybe things like having to announce my weight to a room full of military superjocks who work out ninety minutes a day would be a tiny bit easier.”
Beanie tried to arrange her face in a hopeful shape. “Sure! It’s worth a shot, right?”
This was just the tiny crumb of hope I needed. “I don’t have much time, though,” I said. “I should’ve thought of this a year ago.”
Beanie pointed through the phone. “No negative self-talk! You can’t rush life-changing insights!”
Next, she walked to her bookshelf and pulled down a dog-eared Gottman book. She paged through to the right spot and started rereading: “The main strategy is just to notice what your partner is getting right.” She peered at me, thinking. “Maybe you can just work on noticing what your body is getting right. Things you like about it. You do have some of those, right?”
Things I liked about my body? What an odd thought.
“I have a few, I guess,” I said.
Beanie looked doubtful. “What are they?”
I took a breath. “I like my earlobes,” I declared.
Beanie flared her nostrils. “Earlobes don’t count.”
But I took offense. “Yes, they do!” I brought the phone close to my ear and pulled an earlobe forward to show her. “Look at this little beauty! Look how soft and tender and velvety she is! And she’s the perfect shape: plump and pillow-like.” I pulled the camera back. “My earlobes,” I declared, “are what all other earlobes wish they could be.”
Beanie looked impressed. “Okay, then. That’s a start. I love this fangirl energy.” Then, like she was starting a list: “Earlobes, check. What else?”
But coming up with a second thing was harder. I frowned.
“That’s your entire list? Earlobes ?”
“What’s your list?” I challenged.
“It’s private,” Beanie said, standing up a little taller. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than earlobes .”
“Tell me your list!” I demanded.
“No.”
“This is mean! Tell me!”
But Beanie had decided to use curiosity as a motivator. “Make your beauty list first,” she challenged. “Get ten things on it, and then I’ll tell you mine.”
“You don’t even have a list,” I said, like Bullshit .
But Beanie didn’t take the bait. “Get to ten,” she said, “and find out.”